view results in a table, with customizable buttons for retagging each thread

view results in a pager, which shows the thread content together with a navigation bar with
"Next" button plus tagging buttons.

Opensearch.xml integration, so you can add notmuch-web as a search engine to your web browser.

View individual threads

a visible tree structure and the ability to collapse individual messages

download attachments from messages

customizable tagging buttons on each message

On small screens (under 700 pixels width like phones), parse text messages as markdown and
display the original text message together with the resulting markdown HTML. This allows the
message to be flowed to fit the small screen, but still allows one to view the original
message. On larger screens, the original message is displayed by default but the markdown
HTML is available in a tab.

Compose email

sending with attachments

supports reply and reply all

for composing messages, I recommend Its All
Text to use your favorite
editor.

An optional address book. Addresses can either be loaded from
abook on the server (abook must be in the path) or from
Google Contacts (loading from Google contacts requires a setting change in settings.yml).

Install

Binaries

One nice feature of GHC (the Haskell compiler) is the ability to statically link binaries to not
require Haskell to be installed. I have therefore built the latest release; you can find the
tarballs on the download page. The only
prerequisites are glibc, libgmp, and zlib. The binaries are missing one feature: use of
libicu to decode text/html message parts that have a charset that is
not ISO-8859 or UTF-8 (UTF-8 and ISO-8859 are decoded internally without the help of libicu). The
reason for this restriction is that libicu is not generally binary compatible between different
versions, so I could not link against a version of libicu that worked on many distributions. I am
working on removing this restriction so future versions should include all features.

Source, latest released version

To compile the latest release from source, install the Haskell
Platform. Next, install notmuch-web from the latest released
version on hackage. To do this, from the shell
run

$ cabal update
$ cabal install notmuch-web

The binary will appear at ~/.cabal/bin/notmuch-web and the configuration files (see below) are
in ~/.cabal/share/notmuch-web-version

Source, from bitbucket

To compile from bitbucket, install the Haskell Platform and then run "cabal update". Next, clone
from bitbucket and within the notmuch-web directory, run "cabal install --only-dependencies". Next,
run "cabal install yesod-bin" (yesod-bin is a development helper binary). You can now run "yesod
devel" to start the development server or use the package.sh script to build a tarball. You might
investigate cabal-dev or
hsenv to have an isolated build environment.

Keter

Although I haven't used it, you might investigate keter for
automatic building and deployment. See this blog
post and this
one for more information.

Configuration

When launching the notmuch-web binary, it expects several files to be located in two subdirectories
of the current directory. No other configuration or install is needed, so you can copy the
notmuch-web binary and these two folders anywhere, even deploy on computers with no Haskell
installed.

First, an unmodified copy of the "static" folder must be in the current directory. The "static/tmp"
directory can be periodically cleared, it is used to speed up serving of generated javascript and
css (by using the sendfile syscall). If the files in static/tmp don't exist notmuch-web will create
them, so it is helpful to clean out "static/tmp" after an upgrade. The other subfolders and files
in static must be left unchanged.

Second, a (modified) copy of the "config" folder must be in the current directory. The
config folder must contain:

robots.txt - this file is served as robots.txt as the root and by default denies all search
engines. You can edit to your taste.

favicon.ico - this is served as the favicon and defaults to the notmuch favicon. You can replace
with your own icon if you like.

client_session_key.aes - notmuch-web uses AES encrypted cookies to store session information and
the AES key is stored in this file. If the file does not exist a new key is randomly generated and
placed in this file. Make sure you keep this file private.

settings.yml - the yaml file containing all the
configuration. The binary tarballs contain a file settings.yml.example which should be copied to
settings.yml. See the next section for the settings.

Settings

notmuch-web has four modes: Development, Testing, Staging, and Production. The mode is specified on
the command line when launching notmuch-web. The settings.yml file is split into four sections, one
for each mode and notmuch-web will only load settings from the matching section of settings.yml.
Using yaml references a collection of default settings are copied into each section of the
configuration.

The default settings.yml file is well commented so I won't explain it here. The only required
setting that must be edited before notmuch-web will run is "hashed-password", the hash of the
password to access (see
pwstore
for the format). You can generate the hashed password by running "notmuch-web --make-password".
Other settings like "from-address" and "approot" should be set as well for proper operation.

Running

To run, execute "notmuch-web Production". This will start the server listening on the configured
port. notmuch-web accesses notmuch by launching the "notmuch" binary found in the PATH, so you must
make sure the user running notmuch-web has notmuch in the PATH, is able to access the email
directory, and has a valid notmuch configuration. You might need to set the NOTMUCH_CONFIG
environment variable before launching notmuch-web.

I use a systemd unit to start notmuch-web as my login user at boot, having notmuch-web listen on
port 3000. I then run nginx with SSL on port 443, and have nginx reverse proxy
to notmuch-web.

SSL

Currently, notmuch-web does not implement SSL (although since Yesod/Warp supports SSL we could
support it without too much work so it is on the TODO list). Therefore, you will want to
reverse-proxy notmuch-web. I use nginx.

Sending

When you send a message, notmuch-web sends it using the executable "/usr/sbin/sendmail". If you are
not running your own email server, I suggest msmtp. I use msmtp on
my laptop, it works great. Just make sure the user you run notmuch-web as has the correct msmtp
configuration setup.